We investigate the bilateral relationship between government budget balances and current account balances for Portugal and Germany. We find that the response of the current account balance to the budget balance is greater in Portugal than in Germany. On the other hand, the response of the budget...

Fiscal austerity has not led to a return of confidence and it is not at all certain that the current crisis strategy can be sustained politically and will eventually succeed. Government bonds of crisis-hit countries have lost their safe asset status and high risk premiums are impairing monetary...

The controversy about sovereign debt cuts loomed prominently throughout crisis in the European Union (EU), as the EU legal rules were viewed to impose strict limitations on debt restructuring involving public creditors due to moral hazard concerns enshrined in the legal ban on bailouts. This...

The 'starving the beast' hypothesis claims that tax cuts lead to lower public spending, rather than higher debt levels and higher taxes in the future. This paper uses the institutional setting of German fiscal federalism to its advantage in order to explore how fiscal policy reacts to exogenous...

German fiscal policy is nowadays often presented as a shining example due to successful budget consolidation after the Great Recession. However, the idea that the German success is the result of a well-thought-out economic strategy that could therefore serve as a role model for other countries...

In this paper, we apply co-integration and error correction modelling to the annual data on government deficit, interest rate, current account deficit of balance of payments, exchange rate, consumption expenditure, and government debt in Germany and the U.K. for 1950-2002. There is evidence that...

In this paper, we apply co-integration and error correction modelling to the annual data on government deficit, interest rate, current account deficit of balance of payments, exchange rate, consumption expenditure, and government debt in Germany and the U.K. for 1950-2002. There is evidence that...